Best Buy pushes extra maintenance on the purchase of an LCD TV or monitor. They are trying to get you sucked into the extended warranty, which is like Term life insurance. Are you really going to watch 50,000 hours of TV? Thatís 8 hours of TV every day for the next 20 years. Even the half life of one of those bulbs doesnít make it worth gambling on the extended warranty.

From the Plasma TV buying guide:
LCD manufacturers claim that their displays last, on average, 50,000 to 75,000 hours. In point of fact, an LCD TV will last as long as its backlight does-and those bulbs can actually be replaced! Since this is nothing more than light passing through a prismatic substrate, there is essentially nothing to wear out in an LCD monitor.

Plasma TVs, on the other hand, utilizes slight electric currents to excite a combination of noble gases (i.e., argon, neon, xenon), which then glow red, blue, and/or green. This is an essentially active phenomenon, so the phosphoric elements in plasma displays fade over time. The half-life of these gases is approximately 25,000 to 30,000 thousand hours. At this point, the phosphors will glow half as brightly as they did when the set was new. There is no way to replace these gases; the display simply continues to grow dimmer with use.